Please find the overview of the Public Lecture Series on Healthy Aging (each individual talk also listed below) hosted by The University of British Columbia's School of Kinesiology and Physical Activity for Precision Health Research Cluster. The series will take place at VGH on the below dates and can also be viewed online here: https://healthyaging.eventbritestudio.com/.
We’ve invited internationally renowned researchers and physicians to engage the topic of healthy and successful aging from different perspectives.
It is our hope that through this series of five lectures, our audiences will emerge with a greater appreciation for the many different ways to think about what promotes or hinders healthy and successful aging. Our goal is to support a Canadian culture that values science and discovery to support decisions – at the individual and policy levels.
Members of the greater Vancouver community, health professionals, and research faculty and students are invited to attend. Please register for each lecture individually at https://healthyaging.eventbritestudio.com/. Maximum capacity per lecture is 240.
DATES AND TITLES OF INDIVIDUAL TALKS
Tuesday, January 7, 2020 from 6:00 to 7:30pm
Title: Precision Health: Stanford’s Vision for Healthy Aging
Speaker: Lloyd B. Minor, MD
Carl and Elizabeth Naumann Dean of the Stanford University School of Medicine
Summary: Life expectancy in the U.S. has dropped for three consecutive years, and life expectancy at birth in Canada has stopped rising. Many factors contribute to this lack of progress, but one is the traditional reactive model of health care. Stanford Medicine’s Precision Health vision is ushering in proactive health care that will improve health and wellness throughout the life span by predicting, preventing, and curing disease–precisely.
Bio: With his leadership, Stanford Medicine has established a strategic vision to lead the biomedical revolution in Precision Health, a fundamental shift to more proactive and personalized health care that empowers people to lead healthy lives. Dr. Minor is also a professor of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery and a professor of Bioengineering and of Neurobiology, by courtesy, at Stanford University. With more than 140 published articles and chapters, Dr. Minor is an expert in balance and inner ear disorders. In 2012, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine.
Tuesday, January 28, 2020 from 6:00-7:30pm
Title: ‘Leaving No One Behind’? Winners and Losers in Global Action on Aging
Speaker: Norah Keating, PhD, FCAHS, Director of Global Social Issues on Ageing, International Association of Gerontology & Geriatrics
Summary: Around the world, countries are celebrating, worrying about and sometimes ignoring population aging. Regardless of national approaches, changing demographics require action to ensure that older people are part of the mission of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to leave no one behind. Dr. Keating discusses global differences in approaches to including and supporting older persons. She draws on examples of beliefs about family responsibility for the care of older persons and how countries mobilize care. Canadian data on family care illustrate the high proportion of Canadians who are carers, beliefs about the adequacy of this care and the risks to both carers and to older persons of being left behind.
Bio: Dr. Norah Keating is a social gerontologist whose theoretical and empirical research has created evidence, challenged discourses and influenced policy in global, social and physical contexts of ageing. As Director of IAGG’s Global Social Initiative on Ageing, her research and capacity-building focuses on families and aging, liveability of older adults, and care. She is engaged in international research on the liveability of communities for older adults in Australia, Canada and South Africa.
February 11, 2020 from 6:00-7:30pm
Title: Self-Determination as We Age, and Indigenous Ways of Knowing
Speaker: Evan Adams, MD, Chief Medical Officer for the First Nations Health Authority
Summary: Tbd
Bio: Dr. Evan Adams is of Tla’amin First Nation ancestry. In his role as CMO, Dr. Adams provides invaluable leadership representing the FNHA as he works closely with government partners on population and public health matters that affect First Nations and all British Columbians. Dr. Adams leads a team of FNHA physicians—health and wellness partners to BC First Nations—who focus on First Nations health and wellness with a population health approach with the aim of creating a unique health care model that will be the first of its kind in Canada. He contributes to the continued transformation of health care and responds to the wellness directives provided by First Nations communities.
March 10, 2020 from 6:00-7:30pm
Title: The Environment & Our Health: Novel Approaches, New Discoveries
Speaker: David Rehkopf, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Health Research and Policy at Stanford University
Summary: Dr. Rehkopf will describe a new type of approach to finding new social, behavioral and environmental influences on health that increase the reliability of findings and decrease false positive findings.
Bio: Dr. Rehkopf is a social epidemiologist who studies how federal, state and local policies exacerbate or diminish social inequalities in health. He received is Masters degree in Public Health in Epidemiology and Biostatistics from University of California, Berkeley, and his PhD from the Harvard School of Public Health in the Department of Health and Social Behavior.
March 24, 2020 from 6:00-7:30pm
Title: Stepping into Later Adulthood: The Importance of Walking and Walking Well
Speaker: Catrine Tudor-Locke, PhD, FACSM, FNAK, Professor and Dean of the College of Health and Human Services at University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Summary: Step counting is now a widespread and acceptable approach to self-monitoring physical activity courtesy the recent surge in wearable technologies. And cadence (steps/min) is emerging as a reasonable indicator of intensity. Dr. Tudor-Locke will review current scientific literature related to step counting and cadence tracking with a specific focus on older adults. She will present evidence regarding the volume, dose (frequency, intensity, duration, timing) and dose-response relationships for step-based metrics, including steps/day (volume), cadence (steps/min; intensity), peak 30-min cadence (steps/min; composite index of frequency, intensity and duration), and zero-cadence (a proxy for sedentary behavior).
Bio: Dean Tudor-Locke is a walking behavior researcher and a recognized world leader in objective physical activity assessment and promotion, specifically focused on pedometer or accelerometer-determined ambulatory activity captured as steps/day across the lifespan. She is a trained program evaluator and adult educator focused on practical applications in objective monitoring measurement and intervention. She has also published on clinical vs. free-living gait analysis, including interpretation of cadence as a simple indicator of ambulatory patterns. She has also published work documenting the relationship between time spent in sedentary behavior and relatively low ambulatory activity, measured as steps/day.